Carrington, Peter James and Repiso Menendez, Eva and Lu, Qi and Fujita, Hiromi and Marshall, Andrew Robert Julian and Zhuang, Qiandong and Krier, Anthony (2016) InSb-based quantum dot nanostructures for mid-infrared photonic devices. Proceedings of SPIE, 9919: 99190C. ISSN 0277-786X
SPIE_paper_number_9919_9.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (641kB)
Abstract
Novel InSb quantum dot (QD) nanostructures grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) are investigated in order to improve the performance of light sources and detectors for the technologically important mid-infrared (2-5 μm) spectral range. Unlike the InAs/GaAs system which has a similar lattice mismatch, the growth of InSb/InAs QDs by MBE is a challenging task due to Sb segregation and surfactant effects. These problems can be overcome by using an Sb-As exchange growth technique to realize uniform, dense arrays (dot density ~1012 cm-2) of extremely small (mean diameter ~2.5 nm) InSb submonolayer QDs in InAs. Light emitting diodes (LEDs) containing ten layers of InSb QDs exhibit bright electroluminescence peaking at 3.8 μm at room temperature. These devices show superior temperature quenching compared with bulk and quantum well (QW) LEDs due to a reduction in Auger recombination. We also report the growth of InSb QDs in InAs/AlAsSb ‘W’ QWs grown on GaSb substrates which are designed to increase the electron-hole (e-h) wavefunction overlap to ~75%. These samples exhibit very good structural quality and photoluminescence peaking near 3.0 μm at low temperatures.